Documenting America: Racial Theater in The American Scene

“Our object is not to imitate one of the older racial types, but to maintain a new American type and then secure loyalty to [it] . . . the American race.”

—Theodore Roosevelt,
”Speech to the Knights of Columbus,”1907 ¹

In The American Scene, Henry James describes an autumn drive atop a public coach traversing a scenic valley in New Hampshire under “the spell,” not of nature, but of “the large liberty” taken by his fellow travelers, “a pair of summer girls and a summer youth” (23–24). What strikes James most forcibly is their dangerously “uncorrected, unrelated state,” a uniquely American civic identity that resists “the human or social function at large” (310, 24). In summation, James notes that “the whole phenomenon was documentary; it started, for the restless analyst, innumerable questions, amid which he felt himself sink beyond his depth” (24).

At large, I want to argue The American Scene hazards a notion of the documentary that purposively and productively engages the cultural project of the making of Americans. ² With its intricate metonymies and “chains” of association, James’s text vividly rehearses the racial logic of America’s distinctive nation-building idiom, in which the character of whiteness, in its “inveterate bourgeois form,” is being forged (AS 272). Variously described as impressionist, decentering, or mimetic, the mixed register of James’s “restless” style of response can more explicitly be said to perform, even as it witnesses, the complex range of racial identification, anxiety, and desire that informs virtually every arena of American public and private life. ³ Of particular concern to me is James’s pursuit of two entangled aims: to contest the nation-building power of emergent mass visual culture, and to create a space of cultural agency beyond the reach of but alert to its powerful habits of seeing and recording. Promoting a more complex openness to the claims of otherness, James enacts a potential training for freedom. James’s notoriously aestheticized cultural politics posit an ethos of openness to racial exchange even as they record vivid urges to conduct, and to resist, racial management—the redirection of American values, identity, and identification—within the mobile idiom of race.

This kind of ambition has been obscured by recent work on The American Scene and most notably Kenneth Warren’s, which tenders a narrower version of James’s racial politics in order to raise important questions about the offices of literary figures and institutions in the public culture of post-Reconstruction America. ⁴ His response productively challenges both formalist and new historicist receptions of James’s project by focusing on what Warren identifies as James’s anxieties about “the implications of democracy for the shaping of the novel” (Warren 23). My own concern is quite the reverse: the implications of rapidly mutating novelistic, literary, and high cultural practices for the shaping of the new America. James’s very insufficiencies as cultural observer, his ongoing racial unease, make the practice of “his own arts” for “fixing and saving” these distinctly literary “impressions” (AS 271–72) continuous with—and contestatory of—quite different representational practices for forming the “values of a new” bourgeois “race” or order (AS 273). At stake throughout The American Scene in James’s figures of racial exchange is a form of civic consciousness: the kind of “colour” and face America will put on its unfolding “history of manners and morals” (273), on its facts of racial history, on its mythologies of national character. Equally at stake are the kinds of cultural forms that will take precedence in this work of cultural embodiment.

For illustration of these concerns, I turn briefly to the passages in The American Scene describing James’s experience of the “New Jerusalem” of the lower East Side. ⁵ On that staging grounds for the “Hebrew conquest of New York,” the text is marked by a brooding ambivalence about the “intensity” of the Jew’s “aspect” and “race-quality” (95, 94). For James, the Rutgers Street Jew embodies racial history as a dangerous form of “excess,” and the problematic “strength of the race” predictably turns out to involve precisely the Jewish...